Recommended reads #153
How to hold a better class discussion
“It’s time to recognize how men’s careers benefit from sexually harassing women in academia“
I enjoyed this interview with Casey Schreiner, aka Modern Hiker. (And if you’re one of those folks who thinks that Los Angeles is a godforsaken urban wasteland and not a remarkable destination for natural history and nature lovers, reading his perspective on this might be genuinely interesting to you.)
A train ride through American climate change
“It’s time to recognize how men’s careers benefit from sexually harassing women in academia”
“The University of California’s campuses have pledged to increase the hiring of women as faculty, while turning a blind eye to sexual violence and sexual harassment. It’s no wonder, then, that there are so few women faculty members in certain fields of study at UCLA.”
Three colleges in Vermont closed down this year
And it will get worse, watch out for that college enrollment tuition bubble to pop, exacerbated by a decline in enrollment next decade, because of a decline in the birth rate from 2008.
Here’s a piece of recent history I just learned, which is extremely curious. North Korea was banned from the 2015 World Cup, because five players were detected to be doping with disallowed steroids. They offered a very inventive excuse. All five of these players were struck by lightning while training. They then were treated using a traditional medical remedy involving the musk gland of of deer, which was the source of the steroids. FIFA (the governing body) didn’t buy the excuse.
“It’s time to recognize how men’s careers benefit from sexually harassing women in academia”
To date, two papers have been published from natural areas that demonstrate broad declines in insect abundance over the past few decades, in associated with climate warming. A bunch of scientists experienced with one of these areas argues that the original paper got it wrong, and (based on my quick browse, it looks to me like) essentially that the impacts of hurricanes are so confounding that you can’t reasonably read the data as an impact of warming.
Here are some data that multiple-true-false questions are better than multiple choice questions. Here, “better” means “more thoroughly reveals the complexity of student thinking.”
Every NIMBY’s speech at a public hearing
The case against hope: “But instead of thinking about hope, I want to continue thinking about possibility. When we hope, we have no control over what may come to pass. We put all our trust and energy into the whims of fate. We abdicate responsibility. We allow ourselves to be complacent. We are all just people living our lives as best we can, aren’t we? It is easy to feel helpless. It is much harder to make ourselves uncomfortable by imagining the impossible to be possible. But we can do that. We can act, even in the smallest of ways.”
From Jemele Hill: “They Gave America 13 Goals—And Got a Lecture in Return”
Are hormones a “female problem” for animal research?
“It’s time to recognize how men’s careers benefit from sexually harassing women in academia”
I usually don’t link to preprints, but well, here I am: “Teaching R in the undergraduate ecology classroom: approaches, lessons learned, and recommendations” Perhaps the authors would benefit from comments, as the paper is currently in review somewhere.
The climate crisis is our third world war. It needs a bold response.
Some data: “Underrepresented faculty play a disproportionate role in advancing diversity and inclusion.” Which should be a call for overrepresented faculty to learn how to do this work, and get it done, instead of expecting their peers to be responsible for institutional change.
“It’s time to recognize how men’s careers benefit from sexually harassing women in academia“